"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
It’s not so much that the left looks sympathetically on Islam as the underdog,as it is that the left interprets Islam as the under dog in the enemy of my enemy sort of way. They have just rationalized Islamists as oppressed by the west to fit their particular meta narrative. It’s hard to figure how the poor people of the middle east could be more oppressed by the western world, than by their own despotic rulers, but then you can’t rationalize irrational thinking.